Hyperconnectivity: June 2009 Archives

The Berner Convention (originally 1886, latest revision 1979) is the mother of international copyright law.  An international treaty  "For the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works". The treaty automatically assigns copyright to an author for his/hers lifetime plus 50 years. The right is a monopoly and extends to almost any form of publication. As the revision date shows it does make some allowances for broadcasting audio and TV (wireline/cable, terrestrial or satellite) but not explicitly for the Internet, as it was not yet invented in 1979.  

In practice a body of (case) law has been formed  (and still is being formed: for example the Cablevision DVR-on-the-net in the USA) to accommodate both the broadcasting and the Internet environment.

There are some interesting differences: a cable company delivering linear analog or digital TV (DVB or some other encoding method) is seen as the publisher of copyrighted material and has to get permission from the authors (meaning: has to pay them). The same applies for walled garden IP-TV offerings by telco's. But if the same customer uses the broadband connection of the same cable company or telco and views a video over the Internet, the law does not regard these companies as the publisher. The owner of the website where one can find the video is seen as the publisher of copyrighted material and has to get permission of the authors.

Why? Copyright-lawyers have explained that the difference is the concept of "Common Carriage". The Internet access provider has no relationship with and does not interfere with the content of the messages which he transports. Message and content agnostic. In that case (and only in that case) the company which transports content to and from your home is not held responsible and therefore is not regarded as a publisher of copyrighted material.

Enter Network Neutrality. Wouldn't it be a very nice twist if we use the above mentioned definition, the existing body of (case) law and its consequences as the basis for Net Neutrality? The threat would be: if you mess around with IP-traffic you are in danger of losing the "Common Carriage" status, you risk to be regarded as a publisher of copyrighted material with all consequences attached to that status. You would become responsible and liable if you mess with traffic.

As I am not a lawyer I might have missed something, it might not cover everything (VOIP traffic for instance), but at the least it would cover a large part of the Internet. The beauty with this approach is that nobody will try to change existing copyright case law. 

Maybe......

Classical music is one of the most demanding performances for audiovisual encoding and decoding. Wide dynamic range, listeners with trained ears, many benchmarks. The highest barrier for using the Internet to show performances.

As our desire to get hyperconnected is insatiable, airlines (at least in the USA) are responding fast.  

While rather naieve politicians in the Netherlands blindly follow propaganda of the media industry about file-sharing, while the UK is no different, some researchers from Harvard Univiversity have tackled the real hard question: does file-sharing stifle content creation?

The authors construct a bit of a causal chain between file sharing and the intent of copyright law to foster creative works. First, you'd need to know that file sharing was harming music sales, and that the music industry wasn't finding alternative ways of generating income. Then you'd need to show that the loss of income provided a disincentive to musical creativity.

The authors show that the first two arguments do not hold: the loss of some revenue of direct sales is offsett by higher fees for concert tickets.

If the first two links in the chain are tenuous, the last one pretty much gets demolished. There's essentially no indication that the more challenging economics are slowing down creative content production. In the five years prior to 2007, film production is up 30 percent, album releases have doubled, and book releases are up by two-thirds.

Although the paper could be improved and is not yet been scrutinized by the community, it is al least a solid evidence based approach to the issue. Something which cannot be said for most others.

One of the mantra's of (telecom) competition authorities is that competition will lower prices and improve services.

Text messaging used to be done by sending morse-code signals. Terribly outdated, but surprisingly fast and efficient.
Morse Code-Leno - Click here for more home videos

I just learned of a great site. Both useful and fun to watch. Howcast, around 100,000 video's of HowTo stuff. Ranging from How To Tie a Tie to How To Reform a Spoiled Brat to the brilliant How To Survice a Bear Attack. And to confirm Herman's previous post: they have a very popular i-Phone app. Great for killing a few minutes waiting for someone...

One of our favorite bloggers (James Enck) points to a telling graph in a presentation by Kenneth Karlberg of TeliaSonera.

It is amazing to follow the smart use of Twitter and its API's, Facebook en Flickr by protesting Iranians today. Bypassing the blockade of professionals journalists, using the tools the Chinese protesters did not have 10 years ago.

" Email is the cockroach of the Internet. The place is infested and the buggers are extremely resistant to any attack. We will probably just have to learn to live with it and try to shift to more meaningfull methods of conversation".

The newely launched Microsoft search engine Bing surpassed Yahoo in just a week to take the second spot in the US search engine ranking. This follows from StatCounter analysis of the top 5 search engines in the US from May 29 to Jun 4, 2009. This will not be good news for Yahoo!, which is in big trouble since its takeover talks with Microsoft failed. But what's more important, it loos like Bing took some traffic away from Google. And Bing is not the only new kid on the search engine block. Wolfram's Alpha search engine claims not to be a competitor to Google, but to provide a different kind of search. But in reality, of course, they all try to capture some of the big dollar advertising market. Alpha claims that their aim is to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything. Not a bad objective... For now it's not a very shocking result although a search on e.g. 'population netherlands' gives you a glimpse of what might be in the future. Direct reliable results that are to the point and fun. Like combining google and wikipedia.